Alternate reality sci-fi noir. That phrase alone is enough
to catch my attention and pique my interest. It also happens to be the set up
for Van Alan’s new series Automata. Check out the new
trailer below. I'm so down with this.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

For everything there is to love about Spider-Man: Homecoming—and
there’s a great deal in which to revel—my favorite element has to be that
Marvel kicks off a new Spidey series, the third since 2001, without rehashing
the Uncle Ben/with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility origin story. Thank
god.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Steven Soderbergh and I have very different definitions of retirement.
I’m happy for that fact, though, because it means he keeps churning out fantastic
work like The Knick and his upcoming hillbilly heist movie,
Logan Lucky. We’re still a month-plus out, but this should serve
to brighten up an otherwise sparse looking August, and there’s a new trailer to
whet your whistle.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Outside of the fact that he makes great movies, my favorite
thing about Bong Joon-ho is that you never know to expect from one project to
the next. The South Korean director has turned out the greatest modern creature
feature with The Host, which is still so much more than just
that. His resume also includes murder mysteries (Mother,
Memories of Murder), post-apocalyptic sci-fi set entirely on
a moving train (Snowpiercer), and even black comedy
(Barking Dogs Never Bite). Bong’s latest,
Okja, fits into his larger body of work by being both
utterly fantastic and unlike anything he’s done before, despite the presence of
a fantastic beast.

Monday, June 26, 2017

Once again I find myself in the camp where I’m the
curmudgeonly asshole who doesn’t like the movie everyone else loves, but I don’t
particularly care for Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. It’s fine,
just fine, and that’s as high as the praise from this general vicinity is
going to get.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Let’s be frank. At this point, five movies of Michael Bay-directed
robotic mayhem into the franchise, most potential moviegoers don’t need me
or anyone else to tell them whether or not to see Transformers: The
Last Knight. As the last two installments both topped the
billion-dollar mark at the global box office—the first has the smallest take at
$709 million—this may well be the most “critic proof” franchise in all of
franchise-dom. It basically prints money regardless of brutal reviews. And when
this one dominates the box office, it’s sure to be the latest bullet in the
studio’s “movie critics don’t matter” gun. (Despite earlier this summer when
they placed the blame for the underperforming Baywatch and
Pirates of the Caribbean: Johnny Depp Earns a Paycheck
squarely at the feet of those fun-hating critics they didn’t make the movies
for anyway.)

Monday, June 19, 2017

Are you mentally prepared for xXx 4?
Well, ready or not, it sounds like it’s headed our way, so start thinking of
what renegade shit you’d like to see Vin Diesel do now that we’ve watched him
ski through a jungle.

Friday, June 16, 2017

After debuting at Cannes last month, Jung Byung-gil’s Korean
revenge action film The Villainess is getting ready to roll
out to the public. At least in Asia. Check out this badass new trailer and try
not to drool on your keyboard.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

I admit, I’m a sucker for the “like Groundhog
Day but…” knockoff. Okay, maybe not Before I Fall,
but Edge of Tomorrow is boss. Before you lob sub-par
examples my way, know I’m on the hook for Happy Death Day, a
slasher take on the live-the-same-day-over-and-over trick. This new trailer
looks kind of awesome.

Jean-Claude Van Damme has had a weird career. He’s been a
huge star, been the butt of jokes, resurrected and reinvented himself a handful
of times in a variety of ways (think both JCVD and
Jean-Claude Van Johnson among others). He’s dabbled in
directing, most notably with 1996’s The Quest (where the
goal is to acquire a big, gold dragon that has no name beyond the “big, gold
dragon). His only other turn at the helm is something of an oddity, languishing
on the shelf for years, though it’s finally seeing the light of day under the moniker
Full Love, and there’s a new trailer for you to check out.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Jenee LaMarque’s The Feels starts out
looking like it’s going to be a lesbian version of
Bridesmaids or The Hangover. Like those
films, it’s bursting with raunchy humor, heavily improvised, and set during a
bachelorette weekend. There’s booze and drugs and all manner of pre-getting-hitched
shenanigans. But it’s also sweet and earnest and I got misty at places I legit
didn’t expect. And all of this from one of the few (maybe only?) movies
primarily about the female orgasm.

Monday, June 12, 2017

Another Seattle International Film Festival has come and
gone. That means I spent the bulk of the last six weeks (preview screenings
start well before the 25-day festival gets rolling proper) working full time at
my day job then spending every available free moment in a movie theater,
waiting in line outside a movie theater, or at a computer writing about what I
watched inside a movie theater (or, to be honest, sitting on my couch as there
are more and more screeners every year).

Friday, June 9, 2017

So some of you, like me, are way into long-lost,
shot-on-video oddities that spring forth from the minds of lunatics. You know
who you are and you know what I’m talking about and if you don’t, you probably
don’t need to read any further, because the movie we’re about to discuss,
Jungle Trap, isn’t for you.

For a space mission that never happened, Apollo 18 has a
unique place in pop culture. It’s been the name of a record, a videogame, an
indie rock band, and less-than-stellar found footage horror movie. Now it’s the
subject of faux-documentary, The Landing, which screens at
the Seattle International Film Festival.

Thursday, June 8, 2017

For a stretch of The Mummy, Tom Cruise’s
Nick Morton asks over and over, “That’s really your plan?” like he just can’t
believe it. And that’s essentially my reaction to Universal’s latest attempt to
kick off their “Dark Universe” where they reboot all their classic monster
movie properties with modern action spectacle trappings. 2014’s
Dracula Untold was a failed first endeavor, and I can’t help
but wonder if this uninspiring re-launch will meet a similar fate.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Like Hitchcock with a nasty streak, Argentinian director
Rodrigo Grande crafts a tight, vicious crime thriller with At the End
of the Tunnel. With a twisting, turning, rigidly constructed plot
that shifts and evolves over the course of the movie, this is a dark, tension-heavy
throwback of the kind we see woefully few of in modern times.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Grim, bleak, desolate. These are just a few accurate words
to describe It Comes at Night, the moody new slow-burn horror
joint from writer/director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha). An
unrelenting apocalyptic mood piece about how people cope with the end of the
world, vagaries and uncertainty abound, and the oppressive downer nature is
certain to crush the spirit and will to live of many a viewer. Which means it’s
my kind of bummer.

Gillian Robespierre reteams with Jenny Slate, star of her
debut feature Obvious Child, for her follow up,
Landline. Likeable and fun, though less inclined to stick to
the ribs, the story follows two mid-1990s sisters (Slate and Abby Quinn) who discover
their father (John Turturro) is cheating on their mother (Edie Falco as good as
she’s ever been).

Monday, June 5, 2017

Taylor Sheridan won acclaim for writing recent crime dramas
Sicario and Hell or High Water, which
afforded him the chance to direct his own script, Wind River. Beginning with a murder of a young woman on an isolated Indian
reservation, the story follows a tracker (Jeremy Renner), grieving his own
loss, as he helps a newbie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen), stalk the killer. As he
says, he “hunts predators.”

Friday, June 2, 2017

Fred Beckey is something of a myth, a legendary “dirtbag”—think
a vagabond ski bum for the mountaineering set—who sacrifices everything to climbing.
Normal people don’t know his name, but the hardcore speak of him with reverence
and awe. It’s difficult to live up to such hype, but when we meet the man
himself in Dave O’Leske’s documentary, Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred Beckey,
he more than lives up to the billing.

It’s easy to look at director Bob Byington’s
Infinity Baby as a prototypical “film festival” movie. Shot
in black and white, featuring a who’s who of indie movie staples, it’s at times
unbearably twee, rides a quirky concept to the point of distraction, and is far
more in love with its own wit than it should be—Onur Tukel’s script isn’t
nearly as clever as it thinks it is. That’s not to say there aren’t merits,
because there are, but much of the first half borders on insufferable.

Thursday, June 1, 2017

Here’s the bad news: Wonder Woman is a
flawed superhero origin story. Now that we have that out of the way, the good
news is that it’s mostly awesome, finally brings one of the greatest comic book
characters ever to the big screen after more than 75 years, breaks up just a
little bit of the boys’ club that is contemporary superhero movies, and is
easily the best thing the DC Extended Universe has produced thus far.

Catherine Bainbridge’s documentary, Rumble: The
Indians Who Rocked the World, examines the oft-ignored and overlooked
contributions of Native Americans to the history of popular music. (Hint: It
goes way deeper than the dude in the headdress from the Village People.)